Shining a bright light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls. Also providing advice for writers, industry news and commentary, and a focus on the weird and wacky things that happen at the fringes of the publishing world.

May 1, 2007

Victoria Strauss -- The Insidious Double D's

Today I got an email of a kind I often receive. These emails go something like this:

I just got an offer of representation from a literary agency. When I plugged the name into Google, all I found was negative information. Then I noticed the agency was on Writer Beware’s Thumbs Down Agency List. Should I avoid this agency?

(Pause to allow for forehead-slapping and cries of "Duh!")

People who write me with this kind of question are in deep denial. They aren’t really looking for the truth, or for an objective assessment. What they really want is for me to tell them that despite the warnings and complaints they’ve found online, despite Writer Beware’s Thumbs Down assessment, the agency is really okay, and it’s fine for them to sign the contract. I always feel a sense of frustration in answering such emails, because I know there are good odds my advice will be ignored.

Denial is a powerful and dangerous emotion for writers. It lets us convince ourselves that the publisher who promises to match our $4,000 investment with double that amount of its own resources is telling the truth, and will market our book even though it has already made money on us. It allows us to persuade ourselves that the agent who stops responding to our questions soon after we pay his upfront fee is just busy, and we should stick it out. It encourages us to tell ourselves that any agent is better than no agent. It drives us to ignore the warnings and the cautions, the complaints and the reports, the material we’ve read about how reputable publishers and agents work. It leads us into making really, really bad decisions based on desire rather than reason or good sense.

It’s easy to say “avoid denial,” but not so easy to do. Denial is the opportunistic first cousin of that equally treacherous emotion, desperation. The insidious double D's (sorry, guys, if you were thinking of something else) go hand in hand--the closer you get to desperation, the more tempting it is to surrender to denial. If that lousy agent whose name brings up three pages of negative comments in Google is the only one who has ever shown interest in your manuscript, then, yeah, the urge to deny is going to be pretty compelling.

The best way to avoid denial is to avoid putting yourself in a situation where denial is necessary. Here are some suggestions for that. To those of you who regularly visit this blog, they’ll look familiar, but this kind of basic advice can’t be repeated too often.

- Do your research ahead of time. Plug that agency’s or publisher’s name into Google before you query, not after you get an offer. Don’t approach an agency unless it has a legitimate track record, or, if it’s new, unless the agents involved have a professional background in agenting or publishing. Don’t consider a publisher unless you’re sure it’s capable of marketing and distributing--not to mention producing--its books. Don't target a publisher or an agency unless you're sure they are a good match for the book you've written. Many of the problems Writer Beware hears about could have been avoided if research had been done at the outset.

- Educate yourself about the publishing industry. Knowledge is your best tool and your most effective defense. Acquire some understanding of how publishing works before you begin to query. Learn how reputable agents do their jobs, and what is and isn’t standard practice. Knowing this stuff will enhance your ability to recognize and avoid disreputable people by orders of magnitude.

I can’t overstate the importance of this kind of self-education. Too many writers believe they can skip it, or simply don’t want to bother with it. If every writer made the effort to learn about the industry before diving headlong into it, Writer Beware’s correspondence would be cut in half.

- Pay attention to your gut feelings. If you’ve done enough research on an agency or publisher to start feeling something is wrong, you’re more likely to be correct than not. (And because you’ve done the research before querying, it won’t be so painful to let the agency or publisher go.)

5 comments
:

Having some emotional distance from your work doesn't make the inevitable rejections more pleasant, but it does give perspective. Remember, it's not YOU they are rejecting, but a piece of writing. You are not your writing.

This is a great post. There are indeed way too many people who are in deep denial about the low quality/unsellibility of their narcissistic writing, who are then preyed upon by scam agents who know that these deep-denial people will never have the strength of character to recognize that they've been had----too many people are won over by scammers because the scammers are the only people on Earth who will pretend to like bad writing just to make a grifted buck.

Unfortunately, I happen to know a lot of these deep-denial writers who think their ungrammatical, painful-to-read, muddy prose that would even make PublishAmerica cringe is _good_.

Sometimes I think arrogant "writers" like that deserve to be preyed upon from a karma perspective.

Denial is indeed rampant. I think it's funny that so many people think it's an us/them situation, though. It's not surprising that many get caught, when no one can own up to being a writer of low quality stuff.

There was a line in "When Harry Met Sally..." about how 'everyone thinks they have great taste and a sense of humor'. Likewise, everyone thinks it's the other bad writers who are clogging up the pipes, blocking their masterpiece.

You never hear from a single soul who admits that their stuff belongs in the slush pile. Never.

The single best class I took in college (U. Kan, B.S. Journalism) was book publishing from the publisher of the U. Kan. publishing house. The highest part of the class was the contract. He gave us a standard contract and had us mark it up with what we thought was the writer's responsiblity and what was the publisher's responsibility and did we see things that were unclear or what were our questions. Then he educated us on contracts.

My editing classes were the second most important. Because of them I take rejection with a calm attitude. I'd be able to have something rejected by someone I think is a friend without troubling the relationship because if they are a professional editor, the rejection is of my work and not ME personally. (My first editing professor looked like my vision of Jehovah, 6'5", curly, flowing white hair and beard, former Jesuit, booming voice, intemperate character. You either sank or swam in his course. He wrote a book on it, his name was John Bremner.)